New chapter by Paris Papamichos Chronakis
The Department of Classics and Mediterranean Studies’s Paris Papamichos Chronakis has just published a new chapter related to his research on Greek Jews in the Holocaust. Entitled “‘We Lived as Greeks and We Died as Greeks:’ Salonican Jews in Auschwitz and the Meanings of Nationhood” and published in The Holocaust in Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018) edited by Dirk A. Moses & Giorgos Antoniou, the chapter is part of the first English-language work to analyze the Holocaust in Greece in all its multiple aspects. It examines the symbolic and social bonds Greek Salonican Jews created in the Nazi concentration camps in a desperate attempt to survive. It explores how an evolving notion of nationality sustained group identity formation and the forging of social networks among Greek Jewish prisoners. “Greece” became a boundary-marker, a central category of identification and differentiation inside the Jewish prisoners’ world. Part of a broader reading of the camp universe on the basis of nationality by perpetrators and prisoners alike, “Greekness” was a self-ascribed group identity designating the group of Salonican Sephardi Jews.